Retail environments such as supermarkets employ shelving systems for displaying merchandise for sale. Due to the ever changing nature of products sold by stores, shelving systems employing adjustable shelving are the dominant and most common type of shelving systems used in this area. This is because a retailer may wish to reconfigure one or more sections of the shelves to accommodate products that would otherwise not fit in the pre-existing shelving fit out.
Adjustable shelves often are supported by a single pair of shelving posts which differentiate them from those shelving systems that incorporate four posts and rectangular shelves attached to all four posts. The utilisation of just a single pair of posts at the rear of the shelves allow for more unimpeded access to the products on the shelves.
However the utilisation of a single pair of posts to support shelves brings with it a set of problems in how to support the shelves which may have to bear considerable amount of heavy products. For this reason, and others, the usual manner of constructing a shelving post is to utilise rectangular hollow section (RHS) or square hollow section (SHS) steel members which have apertures cut into them for receiving the connecting lugs that are connected to the shelf to be supported by the post. Due to the structural requirement for supporting heavy loads, the cross section of the RHS or SHS sections are often considerable. This leads to a significant disadvantage which is that the width and depth of the SHS or RHS steel posts reduces the available shelving space. In particular it often means that there is a rear section of the supported shelf that extends between the posts that is of a reduced width when compared with the width of the front section of the shelf. Due to the depth of the posts, this restricted rear area of the shelf can be significant. For retailers, who tend to line products up in lines extending from the front of the shelf right to the rear of the shelf, this means that there will be product lines at either side of the shelf that can hold lesser quantities of product. More often than not, retailers leave a gap at each side of the shelf in front of the shelving posts. Considering that rows and rows of shelves are placed side by side, the loss of valuable retail space along a supermarket aisle due to the posts can be considerable.
Similarly, in some cases the shelf support arms that hook into conventional shelving posts are tapered such that there is little vertical extent to the portions of the arms that reach the front of the shelf and more often than not, quite a significant vertical extent to the support arms at the rear of the shelf where they hook into the posts. The significant vertical extent of the support arms at the rear of the shelf often means that product cannot be stacked below the shelf support arms due to their size.
It is an object of the present invention to produce a shelving post for utilisation within a shelving system that obviates or at least lessens the losses of retail space around the shelving posts or below the shelf support arms.